Visual Analytics.... Again!

With visual analytics one needs to extract meaning from data. It allows us to interrogate data to seek patterns outliers and general anomalies that will help us to solve complex problems.

?

?Critical thinking (analyzing, synthesizing, applying) is the core focus of visual analytics. It allows the businessperson who has a keen understanding of his environment to seek out and engage with irregularities evident in the data.

?

One must see visual analytics as a human centered process. The key is to arrive at?a better understanding of your world in business and to interact with it. So, data visualization and visual analytics exist together and are not separate. Data visualization is the graphical representation of the data. It answers the question” What” how much, and so on. Visual analytics, however, has a different role and answers the “Why” questions. Visual analytics creates meaning from the data and leads to a deeper understanding of the causes and effects in the representation.

At its essence visual analytics must allow people who need the information to get the information, not just the analysts who may have strategic views but those who deal with business?incidents at the point where the business is being conducted and need to react to immediate tactical situations. They need to see multiple types of connections from different sources of data all in one place at one time.

?

How then do we make decisions when confronted with all this information? How should you represent the data, engineer the synapses to allow for critical thinking techniques to solve for complex problems. Interdisciplinary teaming allows for the most significant outcomes. Teams must be collaboratively engaged to discover or detect what is in the permutations of the data, where the clues are to optimal performance.

Practical systems exist in abundance to integrate collate, order, analyse, represent, and generate insights for a better future.